One Man's Notes on Movies and Other Life Obsessions by Chuck Wilson

September 27, 2008

Near the end of the marvelous 1994
film, Nobody’s Fool, an aging handyman, quasi-alcoholic, and failed
husband and father named Sully (Paul Newman) walks into the dilapidated
Victorian house in which he grew up. Sully hasn’t been inside that house for
some 30 years, even though he drives by it all the time, and even though its
weight has been bearing down on his soul for every hour of those 30 odd years.
The house, a beauty once, has been boarded up for decades, and inside there’s
the dusty, half cluttered, unnerving sense of a building abruptly abandoned
during some ancient world war. A blitzkrieg fell here. Sully hesitates in the
doorway, as if his heart has just skipped a beat, and then he walks into his
father's house, which is a thing he wasn’t planning to do when he woke up that
morning. Sully walks in and though he doesn’t say a word, you can see him do a
kind of internal sway, as if this were a horror movie and a swarm of ghosts has
just rushed him (which is what going home is all about). He takes a couple of
steps, and then he just stops and stands there, frozen. Sully halts, and
director Robert Benton and cinematographer John Bailey move in for a
super-tight close-up of Sully’s face — arguably the last true close-up of
Newman’s career — and though Sully doesn’t move or blink you can see the ripple
of history that’s suddenly playing across his mind’s eye — his beginnings in
that house, and the rush of good memories (the laughter of childhood maybe), and then the bad ones, the ones
rooted in slights and misunderstandings that were probably overemphasized, but
which led him, he's realizing in that moment, to squander away his best self.
In a hair's breath of time, Sully figures all this out, and then grows angry
and not a little disgusted with himself, the way a man will when he finally has
no one to blame but himself.

Watching this scene for the first
time, back in ’94, I was flooded with feeling because it occurred to me that
I’m probably carrying around (to no avail) a haunted house of my own. But I was
mostly responding to the exquisite artistry of Newman, who’d clearly brought to
that scene, and to that emotional beat, everything he knew about acting, which
must also have meant everything he knew about living. That close-up taught me
all over again about the specialized acting art of doing absolutely nothing and
doing everything, all at once. At this, Newman was an absolute master, and in
watching the scene again tonight, it occurred to me that standing still enough
to let life and it attendant feelings find you in all their terrible fullness
takes enormous courage, whether you’re an actor standing alone in front of a
camera or a regular person being buffeted by a sudden turn in the day. Onscreen
and off, as an actor and as a man, Paul Newman, who died yesterday at the age of 83, showed us how we too could
become more fully human. (Chuck
Wilson)